• Bello
• Bolivia’s rentier republic
• Evo Morales is popular but not invulnerable
• May 3rd 2014 | From the print edition
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• BOLIVIANS are good at protesting. Between 2000 and 2005,
against the background of a weak economy, a discredited party
system and pressure from the United States to eradicate coca,
waves of marches and roadblocks prompted the fall of two
governments and the election as president of Evo Morales, a
socialist cocagrowers’ leader of Aymara descent. He pledged to
“refound” Bolivia as a “plurinational” republic and end what he
saw as five centuries of colonialism against Bolivia’s Amerindian
peoples.
• This week Bolivia has again seen daily protests. Imitating the
radical tin miners of the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrators marched
in three neat files through the streets of the capital, La Paz,
blocking traffic and hurling firecrackers as they went. This time
they were wearing uniforms: they were sergeants and
non-commissioned officers (NCOs) angry at what they claim is
racial and class-based discrimination in the armed forces. And
this time Mr Morales is on the other side of the political
barricade. Himself a former conscript, he thundered that to leave
the barracks without permission is “treason”, tacitly endorsing
the military commanders’ cashiering of 700 of the protesters.
• The soldiers have a point. Mr Morales has showered cash on the
armed forces, which have built new social clubs and bought new
aircraft, but not better boots and uniforms for the lower ranks,
who complain that they are barred from entry to the officer
corps. Many of the NCOs are Aymara. Their cause has attracted
sympathy from the social movements—of peasant farmers, trade
unions and urban migrants—who make up the president’s political
base.
• In the end Mr Morales may retreat, at least partially, over the
sergeants’ revolt, as he has with other protests (over a
fuel-price rise, for example, or a controversial road through a
national park). That is because his rule is a balancing act
between the social movements and state power.
• Much more than the other members of South America’s awkward
squad—the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Ecuador’s Rafael
Correa—he can claim to lead a genuine social revolution. Bolivia,
which was the poorest country in South America a decade ago, has
a strong collectivist tradition. Although Mr Morales exaggerated
when he once compared Bolivia to apartheid South Africa, he is a
powerful symbol of social inclusion.
• Mr Morales has taken some leaves out of Chávez’s book. He
pushed through a new constitution, put his own supporters in the
judiciary, and has been ruthless in neutralising opponents
(sometimes with the help of the army). He reveres Fidel Castro
and has thrown out several American diplomats. But on the economy
he is much less irresponsible than Chávez was.
• Álvaro García Linera, a white Marxist intellectual who is the
vice-president, argues that creating socialism in a country like
Bolivia first requires the state to build capitalism—echoing the
Russian Mensheviks of a century ago, rather than Mr Castro’s
Bolshevism. The government nationalised part of the oil and gas
industry and reversed earlier privatisations, but went no
further.
• An easier option lies in rising gas exports to Brazil and now
Argentina, worth 20% of GDP last year. Gas revenues have financed
an increase in public employment and credit, a consumer boom, and
the building of schools, hospitals and roads in the Altiplano,
the bleak Andean plateau. Poverty has fallen from 53.6% in 2005
to 29.5% in 2012—a similar rate of decline as in free-market
Peru, points out George Gray Molina, a Bolivian economist at the
United Nations Development Programme. After growing by 6.8% last
year, the economy will expand by around 5% this year and next,
forecasts the IMF.
• No wonder Mr Morales is popular. With the opposition divided,
he is likely to cruise to a third term in an election in October.
But most of the decline in poverty has come from service-sector
jobs and higher wages, according to Mr Gray. These are
uncomfortably dependent on recycling the rents from natural
gas.
• Brazil and Argentina have gas of their own, which they are
starting to develop. Relations with Chile, a potential market,
are frozen by Mr Morales’s quixotic demand that the International
Court of Justice should order talks over Bolivia’s access to the
sea, lost in a 19th-century war.
• Eventually the gas boom will fade. And then? Peru invests much
more than Bolivia, where an overvalued currency and wage rises
have priced out local production. The rentier foundations of the
plurinational republic will one day cave in, upsetting Mr
Morales’s balancing act and prompting the return of mass protest.
That day is a while off, but it will come.
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• MI CRITICA ENVIADA DESDE TARIJA:
• ecommended
guest-siinell 6 mins ago
Does the autor knows that cocaine comes from coca leaves? Why he
ignores that Morales´Plurinational State is also a plurimafias
territory, as viceminister Felipe Cáceres admited three weeks
ago? What about the fact that Morales´Bolivia is now the center
of cocaine production in South America? Please. I red similar
pieces in other papers, ignoring the cocaine boom in Bolivia and
I concluded that were propaganda.